


The Rite Spot and The Lost Love Lounge

by dasyatidae



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Dive Bars, Drinking, M/M, Memory Loss, New Orleans, POV First Person, San Francisco, The Future, Vignettes, cyborg Arthur, kinda angsty but the ending isn't super angsty, love tokens, noir, pianist Eames, prompt: reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-15
Updated: 2017-02-15
Packaged: 2018-09-24 14:36:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9763517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dasyatidae/pseuds/dasyatidae
Summary: It’s been decades since I got my implants, became as much machine as man, and I’m still amazed at how strong the pull of my reptile brain is. How relentless certain kinds of memories are, when they should be tagged and easily relegated to compartments, to deep storage, like so much useless data.A little space noir in which Arthur and Eames encounter each other in dive bars.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pinkys_creature_feature](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinkys_creature_feature/gifts).



> Happy Valentine's Day, Pinky's-Creature-Feature! I hope you enjoy this. :3 
> 
> While not an outright AU or crossover, this fic is a strong homage to the amazing space media I’ve been consuming of late—namely, Juno Steel's story on The Penumbra Podcast! <3! 
> 
> Epic thanks to deinvati for the beta. Her support for this piece was EVERYTHING.
> 
> (Aaand just to run even further with the reincarnation prompt: this piece is kinda a diptych with [my other stupid cupid fic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9710972)!)
> 
> P.S. - These bars are real and awesome, and you should check them out! :D

  _San Francisco, Earth, 2079_

I’d wrapped my job early, a full two days before my employer was scheduled to arrive from the station shuttle for the handoff. I had been hesitant to deviate from my carefully constructed timeline, of course. But it had to be done. The mark was skipping town, and if I didn’t nab him from his favorite massage parlor, his impromptu last stop before SFO, Mars, then who knows where, he’d slip through my fingers. And then X-On Corp would make sure I didn’t have fingers. I’m short enough on bio-fingers these days as it is, and assistive tech is expensive, so I dismissed my reservations and moved up the operation. I was working alone again, so the opposition to this change in plan was minimal—just voices from a half-remembered dream chasing each other around my skull, prodding my rusty emotion drives as if they could bring them back to life. Easily quieted.  

Aside from that hitch, the job went well. It was looking like one of those jobs where I ate the bear. A younger me would have appreciated the limbo-holiday to kick back and run up some deep tabs, but nowadays I can’t focus on my leisure pursuits till a job is well and good behind me, yen in my account and a couple of star systems between me and all involved parties—employees, marks, the occasional co-worker—who might want a knife in my gut.

I’d meant to spend my unexpected hours in the bunk I’d rented on the other side of SOMA—cheap, walking distance from good sushi, the kind of place folks mind their own business like their lives depend on it (which they often do). I’d planned to plug in and figure out my next job.

Yet somehow I found myself wandering the Old Mission in the light drizzle, working up a pleasant buzz, eating one of those bacon-wrapped hot dogs the vendors grill alongside slices of onions and green pepper. It’s been decades since I got my implants, became as much machine as man, and I’m still amazed at how strong the pull of my reptile brain is. How relentless certain kinds of memories are, when they should be tagged and easily relegated to compartments, to deep storage, like so much useless data.

It was an hour, several drinks, and that fucking hot dog before I admitted to myself that I was not journeying at random. I was retracing long silent steps, meandering through the neighborhood that remained in the bones of the Old Mission.

Of course, I found myself somewhere that looked like it was right out of the 20th century. If I could look far enough back in my memory banks, the ones I’d retired and basically locked, I’d probably find that it _was_ —and that I’d been here before. Those old memories weren’t hidden, per se, just pushed nearly to the edges of myself, like a jar on a high shelf you can brush with your fingertips but not grasp. Functionally out of reach.

I almost took another route, almost didn’t walk down Folsom, but as I hesitated on twenty-second, the glimmer of green and pink on slick asphalt up ahead caught my eye, beautiful and beckoning like an Andromedan aurora. I couldn’t help myself; I had to investigate, for old time’s sake—whatever those old times were. I wouldn’t trouble ghosts, wouldn’t wake memory banks sleeping the deep sleep of dragons. But there it was, The Rite Spot, lit up, the neon arrow sign pointing to the dark doorway that was set diagonal to the street like a New Orleans bar.

What I could do was go in and have a drink.

 

If I had been expecting the uncanny, I would have been disappointed. The Rite Spot was a quintessential San Francisco bar, red walled and dark. In that way, it fit right into any century.

I pulled up the building schematics, a brief history, and my factual notes on the place in the time it took me to shuck my trench coat and claim a seat in the corner of the bar. My file on the joint was suspiciously lean. In the 1980s, The Rite Spot had a grime about it; I had noted the cocktail napkins and receipt papers covered in scraggly-lined pen drawings, tacked up everywhere in the hall with the bathrooms. A few decades later, I had also noted its charm, embodied in one of its regular performers: an ancient Japanese man in a tipped-back hat and suspenders singing and playing Hank Williams songs on his guitar to a perpetually small but appreciative crowd.

Like I said, a lean file. Nothing on what kind of deals went down here or the characters who populated its gloom. The oversight suggested either outright dismissal or an intent I couldn’t fathom.  

At first scan, much about the bar was the same—the soothing darkness and the old piano, the prim white tablecloths and the slightly overpriced Italian menu—but the place had undeniably been spruced up. The napkin drawings were gone, and there was no sign of that night’s performer. What other casualties there might be to time and gentrification, I was unsure. Even the public city net would have given me more information, but I couldn’t risk logging on, declaring myself to anyone who might be sniffing for my trail.   

So I settled in and signaled to the bartender. On the surface, the only thing uncanny at The Rite Spot was me.

 

The bartender finally peeled himself away from where he’d been lounging near the antique mechanical register, blue light from the screen he was pawing at glinting across his pale face and his eyes, as if he was some sort of nocturnal animal. Fresh ocular implants. Expensive. I took note.  

He looked me over—the cut and material of my suit, the real leather gloves covering the metal augmentation of my right hand and the ports at my wrists—and I saw him decide that I’d drink top shelf. I almost ordered well whiskey just to be difficult—and because on nights like these I liked to feel the burn of rough booze in my throat, a reminder that my skin was still skin, a reminder of my edges, my limits. And perhaps also to satiate my hunger for a different kind of burn in the throat. A hunger I’d be foolish to indulge.

It’d be a bad idea to pick up some local from this part of town; worse still some drifter like me, trailing baggage and enemies from more than one galaxy and getting me all tangled up in it. Still, if I had a few more drinks, it was likely I’d find myself walking in the direction of Badlands in the Castro.

And I was about to order a double.

“You’ll want to move closer to the piano,” the man said as he placed a tumbler of Quarter Cask Laphroaig in front of me. “Before the place fills up.”

“Oh, really?” I leaned back and looked over my shoulder pointedly. The long, dark room was empty save for a knot of social workers further down the bar discussing case management strategies and a middle aged offworlder couple sharing the spaghetti bolognese in the far corner.

“Yeah,” the bartender said, shaking his head as if to say _wise guy._ “Eames is playing tonight.”

“Eames, huh. Thanks for the tip.” I sipped my drink, tasting the name along with the Scotch. _Eames._ The soft syllables called me to attention like a chime, unsettled me, like the swell of music in a dream that you forget just after waking.

I sat stubbornly for a few more moments, running gloved fingers around the cut facets of the little glass. Then I sighed and gave in, re-settled myself at one of the little tables alongside the wall to the right of the piano. It was a better spot for keeping an eye on the exits, anyway.

And the place did begin to fill up in the time it took me to finish my drink. As I waved over another of the same, clusters of people began to drift in—some with a boisterous, Friday night energy, others subdued and comfortable, clearly regulars.

At 20:55, a heavy-handed E flat cut through the chatter. I looked up from the bottom of my glass, and there he was. Eames.

He was fucking cadillac, and I wanted him to fuck me to pieces.

Five foot nine. Bedroom eyes.

Broad shoulders filling out what had once been an expensive suit.

Lips made for kissing and telling pretty lies and for admiring while they were wrapped around your cock.

One of those rough, low voices that made you tingle at the back of your neck.

The kind of guy who’d treat you like a lady and fuck you like a pro domme.

I hadn’t even heard him play yet, but I wanted to drag him by the hair out of this dive, to be his next performance.

 

He didn’t look my way once, not until his last song was finished and he’d slid the wooden cover over the keys with a decisive thud. By that time I was seething, coming apart at the seams. The blood in my veins and every pulse in my wiring screamed for him.

He brushed off his well-wishers and fans and slid into the seat next to mine, saying just one word—my name.

Then he put his hand on the back of my neck like he owned me already.

 

He had a room out in the Sunset in a rundown, rent-by-the-week place facing the beach. Eames promised that if we left the windows open, we’d be able to taste the fog when it rolled in off the ocean. So we lay together waiting for it, huddled underneath the motel quilt in each other’s warmth and sweat.

“What’s that you’re humming? It’s a—a nursery song? A lullaby?”

“A lullaby for you, maybe, _motek_. You’re sleepy.” Eames petted his broad hand down my spine again and again, lingering between his shoulder blades and at the curve of my lower back.

“Mm. It must be your voice. It’s…relaxing.”

“You want to hear the words then?”

I hid my face further against Eames’s neck, wanting to burrow away from the flickering light in the room. It had been a long time since I’d let myself go, and there was a good chance it would be just as long before it happened again; I wasn’t quite ready to pull myself together, to become sharp and ready again. Soon. I licked Eames’s neck and relished his salt taste. He shivered.

“You sang them earlier,” I said. “I remember. My memory’s not that bad.”

He laughed lightly. “There are older words than those—words more serious.”

And then he sang a verse of the sing-song tune, soft and rumbly, against my ear.

 

_He promised he'd buy me a fairing should please me,_

_And then for a kiss, oh! he vowed he would tease me,_

_He promised he'd bring me a bunch of blue ribbons,_

_To tie up my bonny brown hair._

 

At the last part, Eames ran his fingers through my hair where it curled behind my ears and at the back of my neck.

“Thanks for that. That’ll be stuck in my head for ages.”

“You do have bonny brown hair, my lass.” He tugged his handful lightly, and I growled, my cock stirring despite the rest of my body’s deepening languor.

“What does that even mean?”

“Pretty, love. Bonny means pretty.”

I yawned. “I never…sleep like this…Should plug in, or…”

“S’okay,” Eames murmured, his large hands circling my wrists to rub the skin around my ports. It shouldn’t have felt good, but it was heavenly. He kissed and stroked me until I drifted off into sleep.

 

When I woke up alone, the room sun-bright in a late morning way, I swore half-heartedly and began running a system analysis while I hunted for my socks.

Eames was gone, of course.

There was a banging on the door followed by a sharp female voice. “You out by eleven? Or you want me to add another day?”

“No, I’m good.” My mouth was sawdust dry. “I’m going now.”

The scans finished and threw up a cascade of alerts that made me go cross-eyed for a moment. I should have been more surprised to find I’d been deeply and thoroughly hacked. Eames must have given me some soporific, just enough to put me in deep sleep but still keep my drives online, so he could navigate through my files and extract the information he needed. He had a light touch—in all senses of the expression, my brain prompted unhelpfully. The edge the drug was adding to my hangover was negligible. I actually felt better rested than I did after my usual five hours dozing, attached by my ports. So at least there was that.

The files for the job had been copied, but they hadn’t been erased. So there was that too. Soft of Eames. Like he didn’t want me dead. How romantic.

I wasn’t really surprised to discover the hack, but I was surprised to realize I wasn’t the slightest bit sorry. Those eyes, that plush, obscenely talented mouth. It’d been a while since I’d walked into a trap that had fucked me so thoroughly.

So, no, I wasn’t sorry. Maybe I was going soft too.

I searched that dingy little place twice before I gave up and admitted that the bastard had stolen my favorite socks.  

 

More evidence that I needed a tune up: my logic programs insisted I dig out my emergency papers and bribe my way onto the next deluxe shuttle to Mars. My reptile brain led me back to The Rite Spot.

“I’ve cleaned engines with that proof before,” the bartender told me as he topped off my glass. “But I don’t think this is the kind of cleanse you’re looking for, cyborg.”

“You cut me off, I cut you.” I made my voice pleasant and didn’t bother to correct the man. Let him think I was pure efficiency, all machine.

The bartender retreated until I’d drunk enough to dull a normal person’s hand eye coordination and response time—I didn’t feel that bad, really—before he approached again carefully.

“He left this for you this morning.” The man dug down into his apron pocket and pulled out a small package, folded brown paper sealed with an inch of tape. I tore it apart and looked down at a length of indigo ribbon, neatly wound.

“What’s this for?”

The bartender shrugged. “Could be for luck. There’s an old custom from the other side of the planet…” He must have concluded from my frozen expression that I wasn’t interested, because he trailed off and turned away again.

“Any idea when he’ll be back?” I called after him.

The bartender shook his head. “Sorry, mijo. Don’t think he’s coming back here anymore.”

A few minutes later he slammed a glass down on the bar loud enough to snap me from my reverie. “On the house,” he said.

“Thanks.” I tossed it back. The only pity I’d take was the kind that came in the form of free drinks.

“Here,” the bartender said, picking up the ribbon. “It’s difficult to do one handed. I’m sure if he was here, he would have…” He tied the silky piece of blue around my wrist, right at the stripe of skin showing between my glove and the cuff of my jacket. “There.”

I’ve broken arms for less invasive intrusions into my personal space before. But I’m glad I let the guy go unscathed; I did end up breaking plenty of arms to get off the planet that day.

 

_New Orleans, Earth, 2083_

I found him in New Orleans. Four years had slipped by, but I could recall the taste of his sweat on my tongue, could still picture the overlapping line work of his tattoos, like it was yesterday. _Forget,_ my programming whispered, my first and last waking thought. But I stroked the blue ribbon on my wrist and remembered.

An old associate pinged me with a cakewalk job that paid so well I couldn’t turn it down on any grounds other than emotional ones. Taking the job meant a trip back to Earth, back to the States, away from the comforting bustle and predictable, constant surveillance of station life.  

Even back when I was all skin and bones, a straight up meat puppet making a life of jet-setting through the planet’s most dangerous cities, New Orleans was never my town.

“You’ll like it,” Cobb had insisted, squinting at me from the small square of my quarter’s screen. “It’s your kind of town.”

“It’s a swamp,” I told him.

“You can _drink_ there,” Cobb insisted.

“We’ll be _working.”_

But I went. The money was good, and someone had to keep Cobb out of trouble—a pursuit of many centuries, just as tiresome now as it’d been three generations ago. It’s hard to kick a habit like that.

A good thing too, as the promised cakewalk turned out to be a death trap—and unprofitable, to boot. Took all my finesse and a few favors I couldn’t spare to get us in the clear. The job wrapped, I was grateful I hadn’t lost my remaining bio-limbs. I set about that _drinking_ I was promised _._

Cobb was sleeping it off—real sleep, this time, the twitchy-eyed REM stuff, though I wouldn’t have been surprised if he used the PASIV recreationally, to drift off without the nightmares closing in. I was glad he was out cold; it saved me having to tell him to fuck right off. I was going to get so drunk I couldn’t calculate the odds on the fight I was going to pick, and I didn’t want to have to worry about saving Cobb’s brand new, million yen skin.

 

Stepping outside our ridiculous, ten yen an hour bungalow, I paused on the wide sleeping porch, enjoying the strange sensation of being enclosed on nearly all sides with insistent _green._ Stretching vines and drooping, perfume-dank flowers covered the little structure’s walls and draped down from the roof to the edge of the porch, a living curtain. Up and down the street, the houses were grander but similarly botanical. I pulled out my screen and considered summoning a car to take me to the heart of the city, maybe one of those famous drags where you could drink your way into oblivion and back without walking more than a block; another uncharacteristic, daft part of me wanted to seek out one of the little boat runners that ferried citizens between the islands and various floating neighborhoods of the city. I dismissed that fancy and summoned the car. It zipped into view from behind the bungalow and dropped to hover in front of me. I climbed in and selected Bywater from the map almost at random.

 _Almost._ My augmented hand slipped into the pocket of my linen jacket, and my fingers closed around the slim rectangle match box. I drew it out. _The Lost Love Lounge_ was printed across it in slanted script. I’d pulled it off of one of the mark’s stiffs after knocking him out, after giving Cobb the kick, while he was taking forever to sputter and come to. I couldn’t resist a smoke when I was dirtside, especially on Earth; it was one pleasure, at least, that I couldn’t get on a station. So I had pocketed the matches, despite the fact that I hadn’t found an accompanying pack of smokes on the guy.

I knew from my research that The Lost Love Lounge was one of the many dives the mark’s family owned across the archipelago, half as fronts for their less legal enterprises, half for love of the demonstrative little communities that revolved around their jazz clubs, restaurants, and massage parlors. Cobb had been right, though I would swallow tacks before I ever admitted it to him; this swamp—overrun with cats, booze, and jazz, superstitious as all hell—was exactly my kind of town.

Now I was making my way to The Lost Love Lounge. I knew I shouldn’t mix business with pleasure, knew we abided by my post-job-staying-alive-rules instead of Cobb’s post-job-causing-more-fuckery-rules. But I couldn’t help it. I felt the pull. That same old reptile brain, responding to the poetry of a name this time, goddamn it.

I turned up the collar of my jacket when I hopped out of the car; the sky was a darkening, polished mercury color, and it was starting to rain. I pulled up a map, oriented myself, and walked the few remaining blocks to The Lost Love Lounge.

The Lounge was a squat, flat-roofed brick building—built before the floods with a lack of imagination characteristic of the architecture of that age. I stepped into a dim, red-lit interior, then up to the bar. A prayer candle burning low in its tall glass cylinder sat on the polished wood before me: a soft-featured, glowing Virgin gazing rapturously up from beside where I’d soon set down my drink.

I ordered a whiskey and re-ran my examination of the place’s layout, its exits and its patrons. It seemed a safe enough place to get maudlin, for the moment. Against the far wall, a blue-toned 20th century holo played—some romance, by the look of it, the lovers clasped in a tight embrace inside a small compartment—a phone booth, I reminded myself after a quick query—their frantic caresses causing them to topple this way and that against its fogged glass walls.

I tore my eyes away and watched the flickering Virgin instead, ordered a second whiskey.

“You might want to grab a seat closer while you can,” the bartender said, finishing her pour with a flourish and wink.

The realization shot through me, a blue bolt jolting me back to another another dark bar in a different deadly city. My creaking drives released the memories like poisonous spores, flooding me with details, sensations—his fingers on my skin, a lament in A minor, a silk ribbon around my wrist. While I hadn’t let myself truly forget, I had certainly let myself hold my emptiness at a distance, mitigate it with analysis and clever programming. I hadn’t held the crisp experience so close to my heart that I wanted to groan with the pain of it. “Oh fuck me,” I said, unmoored, awash in longing and his absence.

The bartender grinned a lopsided grin. “Not me, but _he_ might, if you’re lucky. You look like just his type.”

“Mechanical?” I muttered. I threw the drink back like a shot, my pulse racing; it felt like my heart had leapt fish-like from my chest. For no reason. For no reason, surely.

A laugh from behind me. Someone new in the dive, someone who had slid through the impossible blind spot in my security. “Small, dangerous. Brunette,” his rough voice corrected.

The bartender winked and made her way down the bar. Leaving me, Eames, and the Virgin Mary to ourselves—an unlikely trio.

Eames slid into the seat next to me, and before I could whip my hand away—or break his neck—or something—his callused fingers were circling my slim wrist, not touching my ports but slipping across the skin there beneath the worn silk ribbon. Its indigo had long faded to a slight blush of pastel. I felt a stab of worry that Eames’s would break it by accident, and I—well, I was used to it there, after all these years.

“Darling,” Eames murmured. “You found me.”

I couldn’t breathe. “I wasn’t looking.”

He smiled a little sadly. “You try, but you can never stay away.”

His other hand was in my hair, and I was—I was staring at Eames, taking in the fine wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, his broken nose, those gorgeous lips. The same face, the same man, of course, a little more worn but looking just as vibrating with energy, _alive,_ as I half-remembered. As I wanted to remember.

“Here, I brought you a new one.”

When he had fastened the fresh ribbon alongside the old one, I kissed him, murmuring a litany of endearments against his mouth that would have made me blush if my logic drives hadn’t gone completely offline. He gasped and pulled me closer, not heeding the bartender’s wolf whistle.

“Arthur—” he pleaded.

“You took my socks, you asshole. My fucking lobster socks.”

He laughed, then drew back abruptly and blinked at me, wet lips parted in astonishment. “Arthur, you remember?”  

Of course I remembered. They were my favorite. But my teasing, light words shriveled, vanished, before I could speak. “I tried.” My words tumbled out in a whisper, surprising me. “I didn’t want to forget. I don’t know if it was good enough. I don’t know if I really remember. But I tried this time, I—”

“Oh, Arthur. Arthur.” He repeated my name like it would anchor us, running his fingers over my cheekbones, my jaw, pressing our foreheads together.

“I need you to help me,” I said, taking a deep breath of our mingling air. “I need you to get inside my head and help me fix this. You’re the best at what you do. You can help me.”

We were so close together, I couldn’t quite tell, but it seemed like he winced. “Don’t you think I’ve tried before.” He hesitated. “And Arthur—going back, what happened—I don’t think you’ve ever wanted them, those years.”

I had a history of punching men who tried to tell me what I wanted. But this—Eames was right. I had put those memories away. It was worth considering, whether I wanted them, what they contained. Rationally, not with my emotion drives twisted and roaring. “It’s different,” I persevered. “I _want_ the access now. I don’t think I did before, not really.”

Eames drew back, reached for his drink. He looked pained, his brow drawn and furrowed. “But you don’t know that.”

“Or—fuck it, Eames. If not the past, then the future. I want the future.”

He stared at me, those green eyes tentative. I remembered how we waited for the fog to roll in, curled together.

“You’re sure. Arthur, the last time I was in your head, I stole from you.”

I grabbed his hand, and he rubbed his thumb against my pulse, beneath the silk ribbons.

At the back of the bar, the holo ended and began again, its rolling credits merging into a title sequence. The bartender was whistling, moving quickly now, pouring drink after drink. While we were talking, The Lost Love Lounge had filled up with people waiting for Eames to play; some of them were crowding us at the bar.

“I have to…” Eames said, nodding toward the piano. He stood, still touching my hand.

“I’ll wait here,” I said, gazing down at the prayer candle by my empty glass. As the first notes of the piano brought a hush down on the room, I reached within myself and touched the memory drives, probing, grasping at what I had given up.


End file.
